Malted milk ice cream (yum!)

This week I made malted milk ice cream, and it was a big hit.

Husbot: "It's my favorite flavor."
Sonbot: "This is one of the best ice creams I've ever had." "Better even than Cherry Garcia?" "Yeah."
Dotbot: "It would be better with fewer malt balls. But it's probably my favorite that you've made, from what I could taste of it." (She thought there were so many mixins that you could hardly taste the ice cream. That was certainly true, but it didn't bother anyone else.)

This recipe (from The Perfect Scoop, naturally) has a typical custard base, but with more egg yolk. It has malted milk powder added to the custard, and chopped malted milk balls mixed in. I more or less quartered the milk balls, which I got from a bulk bin at Nob Hill Grocery.

Malted milk balls (dark chocolate covered)

At first it didn't seem like the malt powder would mix in completely, but it did.

Carnation Malted Milk
(similar to Horlicks, which is supposed to be stronger;
I'd like to try Horlicks sometime)

The ice cream seemed like it might be too sweet, but the malted milk balls (which were covered in 60% dark chocolate) added a sufficiently complex, semi-savory taste to counterbalance the sugar. Sonbot even loved the last cup of ice cream that I packed, which had almost no mixins.

The suhweet ice cream mixture

I agree with dotbot that we could've used fewer malted milk balls, overall. The first pint I packed had so many mixins, it seemed like there were more mixins than ice cream. I was layering, more than mixing, for that pint, because the recipe said to fold in the mixins. Usually, you add the mixins during the last 5 minutes of churning, but maybe the recipe didn't call for that for fear of smooshing the milk balls.

After the first pint, I realized that I should just mix the malted milk balls in the churning bowl, but I didn't scrape the sides before doing that, so the last cup of ice had almost no mixins. Next time—which will be soon—I'll try reducing the mixins by 1/3 or so, and scraping down the sides of the churning bowl before mixing in the bowl.

Too many mixins (but fewer than the first pint)